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Chinese perms, pizzas and entrepreneurs make money in Italy

By Gabriele Catania | May 15, 2009, Friday | Print Edition

THE global recession, which hit Italy harshly (this year, Italy's GDP is expected to contract by 4.4 percent), has made Chinese hairdressers extraordinarily popular among Italian ladies.

"They are good, fast and cheap," emphasized the wife of a lawyer, fresh from a perm.

The sudden love between Italian ladies and Chinese hairdressers is just one sign of the great energy and dynamism exhibited by Chinese entrepreneurs in Italy.

In another small but illuminating instance, last summer I found myself in Rozzano, a suburb of Milan, which is the financial capital of Italy and indeed the twin city of Shanghai.

It was lunch time on a warm day, and I was starving, yet all the restaurants and bars were closed. All, that is, but one, a small establishment run by Chinese managers, where I had a delicious, well-made Italian pizza.

The Chinese entrepreneurs in Italy work hard, and save scrupulously, and now, with the recession sending many Italian businesses in need of credit into bankruptcy, they are also buying prodigiously.

Milan's Chamber of Commerce has stated that "in Milan for every indebted Italian business there's a Chinese buyer. About half of the individual Chinese businesses ... were established at the beginning of 2008, and the growth has increased in recent times, which have been very tough for Italian businesses: up 12.4 percent from October 2008 to February 2009."

Thanks to the great Italian appreciation for gourmet food, many Chinese businesses in Milan enter the field of food services.

"Italians love dining out, but Italian restaurants are really expensive. That's why they come here," explains a cook from Sichuan Province.

The story is the same in Rome, where many Chinese restaurants offer not only typical Chinese cuisine but Japanese as well. "Italians are crazy for sushi, and we offer them good sushi at a good price," says a young Chinese restaurateur, whose family is saving up to take over the most respected pub in the neighborhood.

"Italian bureaucracy is a problem," he admits. "But the Chinese community here is very helpful."

In Padua, a province in Northern Italy which ranks sixth for the number of Chinese entrepreneurs, bars owned by Chinese immigrants are proliferating.

There, among other beverages, you can drink "spritz," a wine-based cocktail very popular among college students.

"Young guys enjoy spending the night out drinking, meanwhile the Chinese bartenders are nice, and they prepare fantastic spritz!" says an engineering student.

Most likely, this young man ignores the fact that many Chinese bartenders, sometimes former waiters of Italian bars, are now buying out Italian restaurants that have been swept away by recession.

The individual Chinese expats are not the only ones betting on Italy, a country with a "huge potential" as an economic powerhouse at the heart of Mediterranean, with a population nearly equivalent to that of the Chinese province of Hubei.

Thanks to these attributes, many big Chinese companies are being attracted to the Italian market.

For example, Huawei Technologies, the huge networking and telecommunications equipment supplier, has recently strengthened its presence in Italy by establishing two innovation centers that will employ many Italian researchers and engineers.

Haier, the fourth-largest white goods manufacturer in the world, has an important plant in Padua, and Cosco, one of the largest international shipping companies, operates in the port of Naples, where 1.6 million tons of Chinese goods enter annually.

(The author is director of Comitato per gli Studi Geopolitici - Committee on Geopolitical Studies - based in Trient, Italy. The author can be reached at: cataniagabriele@gmail.com.)

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